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Archival Surveying in Style at Glen Foerd

By Celia Caust-Ellenbogen

Antique silver. Sumptuous furniture. Priceless works by famous artists including Violet Oakley. Y'know, just another day in the archives.

One of the perks about working on the HCI-PSAR project is that, rather than sitting in the basement stacks of a dusty archives all day, my co-surveyor Michael and I get to explore all different types of places in search of archival gold. Recently we enjoyed a backstage pass to the exquisite Glen Foerd, a historic estate on the Delaware River in Torresdale, Philadelphia.

The Glen Foerd estate was built in 1850 by Charles Macalester, founder of Torresdale, and Financial Adviser to eight United States Presidents. The estate was purchased in 1893 by Robert H. Foerderer, who would later become a U.S. Congressman (1900-1903). Foerderer was rich from his self-titled leather manufacturing and tanning business, which was particularly well-known for its fine quality "Vici Kid" leather. The estate eventually passed to his daughter, Florence Foerderer Tonner, who was an avid collector of art. She assembled one of the most extensive private collections of prints in the country, and donated a world-class collection of William Blake works to the Philadelphia Museum of Art upon her death. She also amassed a valuable collection of Bibles, including Martin Luther's own Latin Bible from which he translated, and the first Bible ever printed in America.

As archivists, we admired but did not attempt to classify the antique furnishings and priceless artwork at Glen Foerd. We focused on the manuscripts, photographs, and other archival materials we found cached around the mansion. The highlight of Glen Foerd's holdings, to our minds, is a collection of family papers from the Foerderers and Tonners. The papers feature nearly fifty pocket diaries that belonged to William Tonner (Florence's husband) and document his daily life over half a century, 1898-1948. There is also some Florence Tonner correspondence with and about various artists, including Philadelphia local Violet Oakley. Additional financial records and other papers document the family's history fairly extensively, and span about 100 years, circa 1870-1970.

Visit Glen Foerd on the web at http://www.glenfoerd.org and "like" them on Facebook. Email info@glenfoerd.org or call (215) 632-5330.

Historical Society of Tacony: What I Learned

By Celia Caust-Ellenbogen

One of the very first repositories whose holdings we surveyed for the HCI-PSAR project was the Historical Society of Tacony. Right away, I felt the mission of our project validated: the Historical Society of Tacony houses a small number of collections, but its unique materials are a vital and untapped resource for researchers. Here are a few things I learned about Tacony:

1. Tacony was home to the inventor of the world's first solar power plant.
2. A Tacony-based company cast the iconic William Penn statue now perched atop Philadelphia's City Hall.
3. Tacony was Utopia.

Well, that last one may be a bit of an exaggeration. But certainly the vision for a utopia was there.  When Henry Disston moved his saw manufactory to Tacony in the 1870s, he sought to establish a company town that would be "a paradise for the working man of moderate means." The Disston family built quality homes that they rented cheaply to company workers; they restricted businesses on their lands to keep out smelly industries like tanneries, and to keep the town dry by forbidding the sale of alcohol; they funded a free library, a post office, and public parks. One of the buildings funded by the Disstons was the Tacony Music Hall and Library, a registered National Historic Landmark, which was recently restored and currently houses the Historical Society of Tacony. The Historical Society of Tacony's holdings feature Disston company newsletters and catalogs, as well as manuscripts and photographs from several members of the Disston family, including Dorothea Disston James and Thomas Winfield South.

The Thomas W. South papers is, in my opinion, the most interesting and extensive collection available to researchers at the Historical Society of Tacony.  South worked closely with his cousin Hamilton Disston implementing plans for a utopian Tacony; he sat on the boards of many prominent businesses, including the Suburban Electric Company; he was a police magistrate and public official; he invested in St. Petersburg, Florida. His activities are well-documented in the collection at the Historical Society of Tacony.

Henry Disston & Sons, Inc. may have been the most socially responsible business in town, but they weren't even the only metal company operating in Tacony at the turn of the twentieth century. Tacony Iron and Metal Works cast the enormous statue of William Penn that currently towers over the City of Philadelphia before going out of business in 1909. The grounds were later taken over by Dodge Steel Company, now also defunct.

Another of Tacony's claims to fame is that it was the home of Frank Shuman, an inventor who built the world's first solar power plant near Cairo, Egypt in 1912-1913. Unfortunately, the impending World War I halted operations before Shuman's innovation got much friction in the field of alternative energy sources (before there even really was a field of alternative energy sources). Nonetheless, Shuman was decades ahead of his time, and his innovations influenced later solar power engineers. An exclusive collection of original photographs documenting Shuman's work in Egypt is another highlight of the Historical Society of Tacony.

Visit the Historical Society of Tacony at http://historictacony.blogspot.com/ and like them on Facebook. Call them at 215-338-2575.

Welcome

By Jack McCarthy

Work began recently on the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s new Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories (HCI-PSAR). Commonly referred to around HSP as the “small repositories project,” its goal is to make better known and more accessible the important but often hidden archival collections held by the many small, primarily volunteer-run historical organizations in the Philadelphia area, including local historical societies, museums, historic sites, and other institutions. The project will achieve this goal by creating an online directory of these institutions and a searchable database of their archival collections. The project is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Project staff include Project Director Jack McCarthy, Project Coordinator Andree Mey Miller, and Project Surveyors Celia Caust-Ellenbogen and Michael Gubicza. HSP Director of Archives and Collections Management Matthew Lyons serves as Project Supervisor.

The first phase of the project is the current fourteen-month pilot project, which will run through September 2012. In the pilot project, we are focusing on two counties – Philadelphia and Montgomery – creating a directory of all the small archival repositories in those two counties and surveying the collections of certain institutions as a representative sample. We hope in this pilot phase to test and refine data gathering and collections survey methodologies in preparation for the larger follow-up project, which will encompass the entire five-county Philadelphia area. Following that, we will explore the possibility of implementing the project on a state-wide basis, in cooperation with other state and regional archival organizations.

Project Coordinator Andre Mey Miller has been busy identifying and contacting repositories and scheduling site visits by Project Director Jack McCarthy and Project Surveyors Celia Caust-Ellenbogen and Michael Gubicza. Celia and Michael have been out “in the field” since mid September, surveying the archival collections of various repositories. To date, they have surveyed the collections of some seven institutions, uncovering a number of important but heretofore hidden collections, from those in small historical libraries to those at grand estates that are now historic house museums. Descriptive information on these collections will be made available on a project website which is currently in development and will be accessed through HSP’s website.

Check out our project facebook page as well as our photo gallery. You can also follow our progress on twitter (@hcipsar).